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In June 2019, Emeritus cofounders Ashwin Damera (HBS MBA 2005) and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu were thrilled with the rapid growth of Emeritus. Damera and Kalipatnapu believed that Emeritus, established in July 2015 to offer online executive education, was only in the early stage of an exciting journey. The opportunity for further growth and success was immense. Yet, the co-founders were conscious that "what got us here will not get us there." Among the strategic choices they faced was a decision on whether to grow its university-branded offerings aggressively or to promote the Emeritus brand more assiduously.

Amit Kasliwal was a participant of the Post Graduate Program for Executives at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 2013 when he came up with an idea of a tea-brewing machine. Kasliwal conducted a survey to understand the tea-brewing machine industry and needs of the market and subsequently started working on prototypes for the same. He formally set up his company in 2015 and started developing a Minimum Viable Prototype (MVP). Joined by co-founders Harvinder Rajput and Saurabh Borah, he branded his prototypes as MyT Brewer. In December 2016, the start-up ran out of resources. The dilemma for Kasliwal and his team was whether to continue working on an improved prototype or enter the market.

Kasliwal and his team had been working on prototypes for a tea-brewing machine since 2013. After running out of funds, they decide to introduce the latest prototype in the market and test it for user experience. After receiving feedback from customers and observing them interact with the machine, they started designing an improved product. They faced the dilemma about the best way to go about growing their revenues.

Humility has attracted increasing attention in discussions of leadership given the positive effects that humble leaders can have on team and firm performance. In spite of what we know about the favorable outcomes of leader humility, we do not know much about how personality influences humble behaviors. How is leader humility related to personality? How can leaders develop humility? In this article, we look at how the personality factors of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, and Extraversion lead to specific humble behaviors: self-awareness, appreciation of others, low self-focus, teachability, and self-transcendent pursuits. We find that the personality mix of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience form a substantial base for developing leader humility. At the same time, a humble leader can be an introvert or an extrovert, and can demonstrate different degrees of emotional stability. We offer recommendations and a behavioral inventory of leader humility that can be used by leaders and by organizations to recruit for and promote humility, to engage in behavioral modeling and coaching, and to create interventions to develop leader humility.

Recognizing, enhancing, and appreciating positive experiences in our lives, also known as savoring, has many benefits. Research on savoring suggests that practicing savoring is linked to positive outcomes, such as increased happiness and general well-being. Organizations should be aware of the positive implications of practicing savoring and should seek to develop savoring norms, as this can contribute to organizational success. This article discusses the savoring of positive experiences and its application in the workplace. Specifically, this article will provide an overview of strategies aimed at enhancing savoring, as well as past research findings that highlight the utility of these strategies. Different barriers and solutions to savoring are discussed, in addition to the importance of the context in cultivating savoring norms in the workplace.

Blockchain technologies are quickly changing the competitive business landscape. Companies need to think strategically about how best to prepare for a future in which they might systematically enhance value and unleash new value using blockchain. In this article, we address how cooperating companies jointly create unique value with blockchain technology, the risks they face along the way, and how they can mitigate those risks. We briefly identify three different reasons a company might adopt blockchain: to enhance value creation, to strengthen existing value ecosystems, or to create new value ecosystems. Then, we identify three strategic risks of blockchain adoption as they relate to business issues, legal issues, and technological issues. Finally, we highlight four different strategic maneuvers for minimizing these risks. The strategic maneuvers include the all-industry approach, the walled-garden approach, the many-gardens approach, and the options approach. We provide prescriptive advice to managers on how to strategically think about blockchain adoptions, how to identify the underlying risks, and how to consider strategic approaches to mitigate their adoption risk.

Trust has long been recognized across cultures, industries, and organizations as a key component of social exchange. Yet in many communities and organizations throughout the world, there is a growing trust deficit. In this article, we explore what leaders can do to generate trust among the individuals within their organizations to help facilitate better relationships and positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. More specifically, we present a qualitative study in which semistructured interviews with employees at an assisted-living care facility highlight two ways that leaders can build trust within their organizations: (1) by demonstrating humility in their communication and (2) by exhibiting compassion in their behavior. We further highlight two characteristics, authenticity and proactivity, that can help leaders increase the effectiveness of these actions. By making these behaviors part of how they lead, leaders and managers can more successfully generate feelings of trust among the individuals within their organizations and help their organizations to maintain and strengthen their competitive advantage.

Enforcement of laws that prevent corrupt international business dealings has recently intensified. Firms have paid record-setting fines of hundreds of millions of dollars, and individuals have been tried and convicted. This escalating situation demands effective action from business leaders. Compliance has become increasingly complicated as more countries have enacted antibribery laws. To address this situation, I identify four root causes of corruption and present innovative real-world examples of solutions. Combinations of these solutions can be crafted to create high-compliance work systems (HCWSs) to avoid corruption. Firms can formulate their own unique, innovative, and dynamic models to achieve high levels of firm success while also avoiding corruption. These models go beyond trade-off thinking, which suggests that compliance must be exchanged for performance. Pivoting away from such trade-off thinking enables innovative solutions to manage corruption risks and offers firms a sustained competitive advantage over their peers.

Companies spend time and money training employees; in the case of a merger or acquisition, they spend resources such as cash, stock, and debt. It makes sense, then, that they do not want an employee to take the expertise the company underwrote to a competitor. Thus, employment contracts will often include noncompete clauses--sometimes known as covenants not to compete--which state that the employee cannot move to a competitor for a certain period of time. Though not all employees have the heightened fiduciary duty of board members and officers, they frequently have signed agreements that, at least on paper, restrict their employment mobility. Not only have officers and board members often signed such agreements as well, but they also have fiduciary duties further restricting their new employment plans. In decades of teaching courses in the legal environment of business as well as in business ethics, no topic flummoxes students more than this one. After all, in a free country, a person should be able to work where they wish, right? How can such restrictions be fair? Legally and ethically, this is a complicated area and one in which the old lawyer's answer--it depends--is true. This article provides some parameters for employees and employers to know when fiduciary duty precludes certain employees from moving to a new company, including when those are legal in what ways they are fair.

Farmer Lee Farms was a family-owned farm 70 kilometres from Johannesburg, South Africa. The farm was founded in 2005 by Jimmy Botha, a sixty-year-old, first-generation Black commercial farmer. From 2005 to 2017, the farm had experienced steady growth and was recognized as a Black business success story in post-apartheid South Africa. During this period, the farm had a clear target market of high-end food packaging houses and food retailers and specialized in the supply of high-quality, high-value fresh produce. However, a severe hailstorm in 2017 destroyed important infrastructure on the farm that was crucial for growing the farm’s temperature-sensitive products. The capital required to repair the infrastructure was not available. As a result, the farm lost key off-take agreements with high-end retail customers and Botha had to change his crops to hardier but lower-value cash crops. In November 2020, the farm urgently needed to re-evaluate its strategy to avoid bankruptcy, for which Botha was considering four options: continue growing cash crops and hope for a market turnaround, apply for a bank loan for funds to repair the damaged infrastructure, access the available government grants to carry out repairs to the infrastructure, or change his farming methods entirely and learn an alternative farming technique known as hydroponics.

The case explores the rise and popularity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Nicole Blank has bootstrapped her functional beverage company, Sunomi Switchel, to contracts with leading grocery retailers. She is now faced with a series of choices for if and how to continue to grow the business.

LooksRare launched a decentralized and anonymous organization to compete against NFT marketplace leader OpenSea. By launching its own cryptocurrency, LooksRare attempted to lure users with a digital rewards program. The nature of the organization and its business model, however, brought challenges that are unique to the blockchain industry.

Farmer Lee Farms was a family-owned farm 70 kilometres from Johannesburg, South Africa. The farm was founded in 2005 by Jimmy Botha, a sixty-year-old, first-generation Black commercial farmer. From 2005 to 2017, the farm had experienced steady growth and was recognized as a Black business success story in post-apartheid South Africa. During this period, the farm had a clear target market of high-end food packaging houses and food retailers and specialized in the supply of high-quality, high-value fresh produce. However, a severe hailstorm in 2017 destroyed important infrastructure on the farm that was crucial for growing the farm's temperature-sensitive products. The capital required to repair the infrastructure was not available. As a result, the farm lost key off-take agreements with high-end retail customers and Botha had to change his crops to hardier but lower-value cash crops. In November 2020, the farm urgently needed to re-evaluate its strategy to avoid bankruptcy, for which Botha was considering four options: continue growing cash crops and hope for a market turnaround, apply for a bank loan for funds to repair the damaged infrastructure, access the available government grants to carry out repairs to the infrastructure, or change his farming methods entirely and learn an alternative farming technique known as hydroponics.

Countless enterprise blockchains fail to live up to high expectations, often because the supporting governance structures are insufficiently established or have become stagnant. Based on interviews with 153 blockchain executives and an analysis of publicly documented use cases, this article offers a guide for blockchain scholars and practitioners. Its framework highlights the coordination and control challenges that exist in blockchain governance contexts and presents four generic governance modes to address them: chief, clan, custodian, and consortium. Managers can use these governance modes as a basis for four strategic moves (connecting, isolating, loosening, and tightening) to navigate blockchain governance challenges.

On March 17, 2018, the founder and owner of Memon Lubricants, a Shell Pakistan Limited distributor located in Sukkur, Pakistan, was trying to find the best recruitment process to hire a new sales team. Memon Lubricants had just opened a second location in Khairpur, approximately 30 kilometres south of Sukkur. Several constraints that affected the process included a tight budget, limited availability of skilled and qualified candidates, and pressure to complete the recruitment quickly, Therefore, the founder wanted to adopt a more efficient recruitment process than the one he had used to hire a sales force at his first branch in Sukkur. He first had to identify the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes of ideal sales representatives. He then had to encourage appropriate candidates to apply for the positions. Generally, he had to improve the current recruitment process.

Spreadsheet supplement to case 222057.

After years of learning from the best bakeries around the world, Polish entrepreneur Monika Walecka returned to her native Poland and, in 2019, opened her artisanal bakery, All in Flour. The bakery was an extension of her values and struck a delicate balance between financial and social objectives. All in Flour was located in one of the most upscale districts of Warsaw and focused on top-quality bread products. It used high-quality, diverse, and expensive ingredients sourced from small, local suppliers, and its bread prices were probably the highest in Warsaw. Walecka was considering whether to pursue any development options. In fact, her preferred option, at present, was to do nothing. She knew that growth was not an obvious choice because it came with risk, costs, and problems. Nevertheless, the decision of whether to change something was becoming the most important challenge of her entrepreneurial career as a baker.